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Dr Tim Pearce
Some people want to master the perfect Bake-Off sponge cake to get the all-important Hollywood-handshake or create a Michelin Star-worthy dinner for their nearest and dearest, and aesthetic clinicians are no different. They strive to be at the top of their game and achieve master injector status when delivering facial aesthetic treatments.
Like all recipes, and journeys to culinary perfection, the secret to aesthetic success lies in knowing the right ingredients to use and how to get the best from them. Dr Tim Pearce is often asked about his top tips, or ingredients for aesthetic success – the ones which make top injectors stand out from the crowd.
In this blog, Dr Tim Pearce will shed light on his six top tips for clinicians who are starting out in aesthetic practice, including winning the identity crisis, understanding your competence, getting the treatment design right, aesthetic awareness, knowing your anatomy and physiology, and complications education. Keep reading though because there is a seventh tip that we will tell you about at the end!
Dr Tim will be discussing more medical aesthetic training tips as part of his upcoming webinar series, so if you’re looking to increase your CPD-certified learning and want to learn more skills to make you a better practitioner, then step one is to register for the free webinars by Dr Tim.
What are the ingredients that make a successful aesthetic injector?
There are many ingredients for you to consider and steps on your road to mastery. Each must be understood, achieved, or overcome until you reach the Holy Grail and know that you truly are a master of your craft.
Tip 1: Overcome the battle with your identity crisis
Many aesthetic clinicians have come from a background in the NHS as a medical doctor or nurse and start to wonder, once they have embarked on a career in the aesthetics world, if they need to adapt to ‘fit in’. They question if they need to change how they operate, how they interact with people, and even how they dress, so that they are ‘accepted’ within this new sector. Many practitioners struggle with how they will be perceived as an aesthetic clinician – are they too old, too young, the wrong gender or race, even. All these issues and concerns with identity are commonplace and Dr Tim has seen them with many practitioners that he has mentored over the years.
The way to overcome this is to remember that your perception of what you think you are being judged for will disappear if you focus on solving your patient’s problems and being good at doing it! Your abilities will give you the validation you need to know that you belong in the aesthetic sector, and you will begin to stop worrying about whether you fit in or need to change your behaviour. You don’t.
Tip 2: What makes you a competent injector?
Many aesthetic clinicians focus on the technical skills of giving safe and effective injections. They target all their attention at being the best of the best as a route to greater competency in aesthetic practice. This is misguided.
Technical skills are built upon layers of other fundamental skills and medical knowledge, which all inform how you inject – depth, needle position, angle, volume delivered etc. – in other words, your understanding of what is underneath the skin is critical to competency. To suggest that if you practise and hone the simple steps of delivering safe injections, you are competent, and thus anyone can inject with practice, is clearly flawed. Copying a technique is not enough, much like copying the exam answers of the child sat next to you at school does not mean that you know or understand what you have just written down and why that is the correct answer. Competency comes from the knowledge underneath the application – the experience, the wisdom, and the technical skills. That is when you start to write your own answers and do not need to copy everyone else.
Tip 3: Do not overlook your treatment design
When it comes to delivering aesthetic treatments, we can think of it like building a house. You need the technical skills of a brick layer to build the walls, but you also need an architect to understand where those walls should go and how to design a house.
The best aesthetic clinicians have both the technical skills and the design skills. This will truly make a treatment optimum for the patient who is sat in front of you, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach to your treatments.
Tip 4: Be consciously aware of the aesthetic
You will need to hone the ability to notice the body language and unconscious cues from your patients which tell you how their current aesthetic is making them feel unhappy. Learn to notice the aspects of their face which have put their aesthetic off balance – making them look or feel angry, sad, old, tired, or less beautiful. Once you build a conscious awareness of the aesthetic, you can create your treatment designs to try to change it for every patient. You cannot get the best results from delivering injectable treatments without an awareness of the aesthetic. Even perfectly executed injections can produce ugly results.
It does not require a prerequisite for artistic flare and can be learnt with the correct training and mentoring. You can also try to study faces, learn how they change with ageing, how these changes impact beauty ideals and facial proportions. If you do have a joy for art, you could even consider drawing or sculpting faces to really get a feel for the contours, shadows, and dynamics of the face.
Tip 5: The anatomy and physiology of the face
The anatomy is simply defined as ‘what you are injecting’ – the layers and structures of the face. How the placement of the product is going to change that anatomy, both now and over time, is the physiology. Remember, the face has dynamic anatomical structures and is designed for communication. It has a musculature unlike anywhere else on the body. The aesthetics, and a good aesthetic result is not static (like a before and after photograph), but dynamic, providing an essential part of the human skill of non-verbal communication. Understanding the rules, ratios, and functions of the facial anatomy is key for both safety and optimum aesthetic results.
Familiarise yourself with more than just the muscles and arteries and understand the movement of facial structures and tissue. Every part of the facial anatomy is relevant – the ligaments, connective tissue, SMAS, deep and superficial fat pads, veins, nerves – all of it.
Dr Tim has a great collection of artistic anatomy posters available to buy if you need some helpful reminders on your clinic walls.
Tip 6: Minimise the risk of complications
Learn to inject ‘around’ complications to prevent them from happening, as well as knowing what to do if a complication occurs.
Although they are generally rare, you must feel competent to deal with aesthetic complications or you will find that it will have an adverse effect on your practice. It can hold you back from exploring or designing the best treatments for fear of causing a complication. This will lead to an overly conservative approach to everything you do which will be reflected in the results achieved, or lack thereof, making both you and your patient unsatisfied.
If you want to learn more about mastering medical aesthetic treatments and complications or conquering the anxiety of where to place your needle, then register for the next Dr Tim webinar.
One extra tip: do not forget about the patient’s psychology
It is one thing to achieve great treatment results which change or improve the appearance of an individual’s face, but it is not good if what you do does not also have a positive effect on improving their life, or worst case makes them feel bad. Learn to gauge what your patient is thinking and feeling and learn to incorporate that into your treatments so you can alleviate the underlying psychosocial problem that is concerning your patient.
Learn more about why your patient is the most important part of everything you do in our blog, how do you justify your decision to treat a patient with a medical aesthetic intervention?
Becoming a master aesthetic injector in a nutshell
The recipe is complete and to become a master aesthetic injector you will need to develop the injection technique skills and the treatment design, or the ability to assemble the injection techniques into a treatment that will make a difference to your patient. To inform your injection techniques, you need to understand the anatomy, the aesthetic, and the patient’s psychology. When you integrate all these ingredients into a good consultation, you will create treatment plans that change people’s lives, and that is the recipe for successful aesthetic practice.
Skinviva training offer a variety of aesthetic training courses to help you to master injection techniques and you can find a range of Dr Tim’s Top Tips and Dr Tim’s ‘How to’ series on YouTube.
Aesthetics Mastery Show
Dr Tim’s 6 lessons that all top injectors master
What are the ingredients to make a really fantastic injector? This week Dr Tim reveals how he’s often asked for his top tips that help set him and other top injectors like him apart from the crowd.
Are you still anxious about delivering cosmetic injectables safely?
If you want to learn more about mastering medical aesthetic treatments and complications or conquering the anxiety of where to place your needle, then register for the next Dr Tim webinar.
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Dr Tim Pearce eLearning
Dr Tim Pearce MBChB BSc (Hons) MRCGP founded his eLearning concept in 2016 in order to provide readily accessible BOTOX® and dermal filler online courses for fellow Medical Aesthetics practitioners. His objective was to raise standards within the industry – a principle which remains just as relevant today.
Our exclusive video-led courses are designed to build confidence, knowledge and technique at every stage, working from foundation level to advanced treatments and management of complications.
Thousands of delegates have benefited from the courses and we’re highly rated on Trustpilot. For more information or to discuss which course is right for you, please get in touch with our friendly team.
